Instability of black hole formation under small pressure perturbations

Abstract

We investigate here the spectrum of gravitational collapse endstates when arbitrarily small perfect fluid pressures are introduced in the classic black hole formation scenario as described by Oppenheimer, Snyder and Datt (OSD) (Oppenheimer and Snyder in Phys Rev 56:455, 1939; Datt in Zs f Phys 108:314, 1938). This extends a previous result on tangential pressures (Joshi and Malafarina Phys Rev D 83:024009, 2011) to the physically more realistic scenario of perfect fluid collapse. The existence of classes of pressure perturbations is shown explicitly, which has the property that injecting any smallest pressure changes the final fate of the dynamical collapse from a black hole to a naked singularity. It is therefore seen that any smallest neighborhood of the OSD model, in the space of initial data, contains collapse evolutions that go to a naked singularity outcome. This gives an intriguing insight on the nature of naked singularity formation in gravitational collapse.